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Monday, 3 June 2013

Banksy's Slave Labour mural auctioned in London

Tony
Baxter from The Sincura Group told the BBC's Will Gompertz that the auction is
a chance for the work to stay in the UK

A Banksy artwork that went missing from a wall in
north London is up for auction for a second time.

The mural Slave
Labour was taken from Wood Green in February. It later appeared at a Miami
auction, but was withdrawn after protests.

The graffiti
art is now being offered for sale in London by the Sincura Group. The minimum
bid is £900,000.

MP Lynne
Featherstone has urged the owners of the mural to give it back to the residents
of north London.

The mural,
which depicts a boy hunched over a sewing machine making union jack bunting,
appeared on the side of a Poundland store in May 2012, just before the Diamond
Jubilee celebrations.

'Enhanced an area'

It was being
auctioned at the London Film Museum in Covent Garden on Sunday evening.

Sincura said
the mural had been "sensitively restored" and if the piece did not
reach the reserve price it would be sold to a collector in the US.

Tony Baxter, director of the Sincura Group, said he
could not divulge the owner of the piece but insisted it was being sold
legally.

He said there was a chance the work would leave the
UK unless an "angel" bought it and put it in a museum.

But Ms Featherstone, Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey
and Wood Green, said: "This is admirable, perhaps, but also incredibly
optimistic.

"So now I make this direct plea to the owners of
the Banksy piece: You have this one last chance to do the right thing.

"You have deprived a community of an asset that
was given to us for free and greatly enhanced an area that needed it.

"I call on you, and your consciences, to pull
the piece from both potential sales and return it to its rightful place."

When the Bristol artist's mural was up for auction in
Miami, it was expected to fetch up to £450,000.

It was suspected the work had been stolen when it
disappeared, but the Metropolitan Police said there were "no reports of
any theft".

Replicas

Six identical copies of the mural reportedly appeared
in Wood Green on Saturday morning, 36 hours ahead of the auction.

According
to The Sun, the replicas - painted on polystyrene - were left outside the
same Poundland store where the original appeared.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed to the BBC that one
of the replicas was later confiscated from a member of the public.

"At 10:40 hours on Saturday, 1 June, police
stopped a man in possession of a piece of artwork in Wood Green," they
said.

"The artwork is being treated as property found
on the street and has been taken to a North London police station."